Reviews for Huck: The Remarkable True Story of How One Lost Puppy Taught a Family--and a Whole Town--About Hope and Happy Endings

The average rating for Huck: The Remarkable True Story of How One Lost Puppy Taught a Family--and a Whole Town--About Hope and Happy Endings based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-03-12 00:00:00 Gregory Welch I love dogs, and I have previously enjoyed books about animals -- especially true stories like this one. So, I was expecting an enjoyable read. However, the book was only OK at best--and at times even a little annoying. The author clearly does not see life from the perspective of the average, not-from-New-York-City person. It gets irritating at times how amazed she is by the way ordinary people live and act outside the city. "Huck" might have made a decent short story, but the author has padded it out into a book by adding lots of irrelevant details about characters who make only brief appearances in the story. (Yet somehow despite all that detail, these people never jump off the page at you, nor even seem all that interesting.) Then, she adds boring passages that have nothing to do with the main story such as her trip to buy herself some sunglasses and a long description of Tampa--where the family only spends a few hours. You would think she assumes that none of us readers has ever heard of Tampa before! Perhaps the biggest problem with the book, though, is its total failure to make you fall in love with the dog that the whole story is centered around. The author seems to miss the fact that in order for a reader to care about a character (including an animal character), you must create a personality for that character in the reader's mind. As much as I love dogs, this dog never felt real to me. And why should he when all I ever learned about him was what he looks like and what he likes to eat? The reader is never given a feeling of genuine relationship between the author and the dog. If I wanted you to know my dog, I would tell you stories about the funny things he has done, the naughty things he has done, his personality quirks that make him special to my family. All of these things are missing from the book. Real dogs (like mine!) are one-of-a-kind characters. Huck, on the other hand felt generic and 2-dimensional. I hate to say it, but while reading this book I found myself doubting the author's truthfulness at times. For example, she talks about how she and her husband did all this research to decide what kind of dog to buy before purchasing Huck from a breeder in FL and having him shipped up on an airplane. She states that they were not aware of shelter dogs at the time or they certainly would have considered one. But how can you do all that research and NOT EVER hear about animal shelters and the dogs waiting for homes? How can you be a journalist and be so ignorant? I felt that she inserted this "disclaimer" only to avoid offending people and probably because her editor recommended it. I also grew weary of hearing how the author really couldn't afford the expensive new sunglasses she bought, or the hundreds of color flyers she printed, or the $1000 reward she and her husband decided to offer(not to mention the travelling they do and the cost of having a dog flown up from FL!). Does she have any idea how average people live and what it REALLY means to "not be able to afford" something? I doubt it. I felt like these financial concerns were just another thing inserted into the story in an attempt to make the author and her family sound more relatable to the average reader. The attempt fails miserably. 2 stars because there are some good sections in the book --such as the section about the author's bout with cancer. Maybe the book should have been about that!

Review # 2 was written on 2020-06-14 00:00:00 Ronan Mcloughlin As the "dog mama" of four toy poodles, I enjoyed reading this book about Huck and his family. It was just wonderful how helpful everyone was to the Elder family during Huck's disappearance! I would recommend this to all dog-lovers!